Patients abandoned in hospital fire

FLEEING medical staff abandoned patients to a raging fire that killed 89 people in a seven-storey hospital in India, officials said.

Police arrested six hospital officials on charges of culpable homicide in Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta.

Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of the state of West Bengal, ordered the hospital’s licence withdrawn. The hospital denied any violations of safety measures.

“It was horrifying that the hospital authorities did not make any effort to rescue trapped patients,” said Subrata Mukherjee, state minister for public health engineering. “Senior hospital authorities ran away after the fire broke out.”

As the fire spread from the hospital’s basement, rescue workers smashed windows in the upper floors of the AMRI Hospital to pull surviving patients out before they suffocated from smoke inhalation, while sobbing relatives waited on the street below.

Rescuers took patients on stretchers and in wheelchairs to a nearby hospital.

Moon Moon Chakraborty called her husband to tell him a fire had broken out.

“She had died by the time I reached the hospital,” her husband said.

One survivor told Indian television she was sitting at her mother’s bedside when smoke came into the room.

“My mother was continuously telling me that she was feeling suffocated and uneasy,” she said. “I kept ringing the bell for the nurse, but no one came.”

Rescue workers managed to evacuate her mother more than two hours after the fire started, she said.

Emergency workers pulled 73 bodies from the building, and another 16 succumbed to their injuries later, said police.

Hospital officials said four of the bodies pulled from the building were those of staff. The remainder were patients and relatives who were aiding in their care.

However, not all patients said they were abandoned. Jyoti Chaudhary was lucky to survive.

“With the help of a hospital worker, I came down the staircase and later was moved to a nearby hospital,” he said.